Will Krause

This foam sword pops out of a coffin and stabs someone! Since we couldn’t fit a whole sword in a coffin, and we couldn’t stab anyone for real, I made the sword in two halves.

The front half to pop out of the coffin (I rigged it to operate pneumatically,) and the hilt, which has a flat base to attach beneath a hole in the actor’s clothes. The blade is made out of silver-painted foam, and I was able to get a serrated effect by wiggling the razor blade as I cut. The hilt was made out of a goofy old gold lame’ belt, which I brushed with a light coat of brown acrylic paint.

I made this giant rotating milkshake for a pie/milkshake merchant. The provided graphics were applied to gatorboard which I sandwiched around a signpost and then bulked-up with some polyurethane foam. The edge was painted white and covered with glitter.

The base is plywood and contains a drill motor, which spins the giant milkshake!

This one was fun to make! I traced my hand, scaled it up 200% and then made a foam hand with acrylic nails from the pattern. The arm is made out of 2×4′s glued together and swung with the aid of pneumatics. I scaled up a normal wooden chair 150% and built it out of 2x4s and plywood. The shoes are just clown shoes painted with flat black paint. I made a sleeve out of a trouser leg and Jessie Voris helped out by stitching together some pant legs for the project.

It was tested out by almost everyone in the props department.

This one was a challenge! I made this creature out of all sorts of materials: lobster claws, doll parts, shells from the beach, latex gloves, ping-pong balls, dust masks, shark jaws, lots of latex, and a toy octopus… a real potpourri of stuff.

Katie Akana thought of the pneumatic mechanism to suddenly open the creatures’ eyes, and Courtland Premo wired up a remote control device which used CO2 cartridge tire inflators and servos to operate the pneumatics.

I made these two pies for a cooking segment on Sesame Street. One pie needed to be made out of eight complete baked apples, and the other out of eight sliced apples, with a pair of eyeglasses hidden inside. I made the crusts out of sculpey, and the apples were standard fake styrofoam fruit… I made the apples look baked by crushing them slightly so that their surface became wrinkled.

The pie filling is made out of “elastack” tinted with melted crayons. Elastack is very stretchy, so it was easy for the material to cover a hole which hid the eyeglasses inside the pie.

Also, little plastic cups are hidden in the pies and each one holds a little applesauce which could be eaten during a taste-test.

I made this piece for a Family Circus-themed art show at the Guilty Pleasures Gallery (aka: curator Liz Zanis’s apartment.)

Billy runs when the large orange ring background rotates – the ground beneath his feet has offset bumps so that each foot is alternately set in motion. The faster the ring spins, the faster little Billy’s foam legs run.

It was made out of leftover materials destined for the trash: dented foamcore, faded construction paper, scraps of insulation foam, and almost-empty tubes of paint.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company contacted me to perform repairs on a prop stuffed turkey that was 44 years old! It was first used in a performance of “Orbs” in 1966. 44 is very old for an item made out of latex rubber, and I started my restoration by carefully trimming away all of the rubber that had hardened and become brittle. Quite a bit needed to be removed, since the turkey was left hanging in a window and the areas which were exposed to sunlight were especially deteriorated. One of the legs had broken away entirely, and the head had shattered and was missing a large chunk.

I rebuilt the head with polyurethane foam, and added new stuffing to bring the turkey back into turkey-shape. The body had become flattened and wrinkled over time, so I needed to cut away the worst of the wrinkles, and patch over these areas with bandages made out of gauze and liquid latex. I stitched together the holes in the old latex, and bandaged over the repairs to blend them in with the turkey’s skin.

Finally, I painted the turkey with a coat of tinted latex and the old bird was ready to take to the stage.

I made this stork puppet for the recent season of Whitest Kids U’Know. It needed to be used as both a sock puppet when the head peeked through a window, and as a full-size flying puppet. The head is removable to serve as a sock puppet, and it fits back onto the body when the full bird needs to be used.

The framework of the stork is foam, wire, and corrugated cardboard, and the covering is a rough, stretchy wool-like material and lots of real feathers.

I made these pedestals for a display of new jewelry at DeBeers.  The rocks are made from polystyrene foam, and coated with concrete (for the rough rocks) and foamcoat (for the smooth rocks.) I had help from Andrew Bunch and Tom Smolenski with sculpting and finishing the 50 artificial rocks that went into the display.

My task on this project was creating an automatic mechanism that would fire a dozen eggs at contestants on Silent Library.

I experimented with a tennis-ball-style launcher first, but settled on a gatling gun setup, powered by a disassembled t-shirt gun. The revolver chamber is made out of sections of PVC tubing ringed with UVA foam to prevent air from leaking out of the gun. A one-way mechanism rotates the revolving barrels to advance a new egg into place whenever the chicken cycles. A cable pulls on the gun’s trigger when the chicken is in the horizontal so that the eggs will fire out of the rear of the chicken at the right moment. Dario Gimenez sculpted the chicken-shaped cover for the machine.

Below is a video of the mechanism at work (with the air gun removed,) followed by a clip of the egg gun firing a few eggs at a contestant.